Article marketing has been, and continues to be, one of the most popular and one of the most effective traffic generating techniques available online today. As we all know, the number of visitors who frequent your home page on a regular basis form the foundation of your home based business because of the new sales, repeat sales and new customers, through referrals, they generate for your enterprise. All the components that make up your articles play a vital role in generating these visitors and none more so than your editorial’s resource box.
Also known as the author’s biography box or signature file (sig file); this summarized information provides the only link for your potential customers to your home business website via your article. When your finished work is submitted to the various article directories online for publication your bio box is the final chance you have to entice your reader’s to click on your website link and visit your business to view your product offers.
So, as you can see, this resource is aptly named because it is indeed, as it’s definition suggests, a source for finding solutions to problems which is what most of your visitors need. Your sig file should therefore contain your name, a link back to your website, a brief summary of what your product can do for your potential customers or it’s unique selling proposition (USP), some information about you and your business as well as what’s described as a call to action or instructions for your visitor as to what to do next to get more information about your merchandise.
As you may have realized by now, how you present this information is vital with regard to what your reader’s do next. Do they click on your link and become paying customers because they were impressed with your product description and your credentials or do they go elsewhere looking for a solution to their needs.
An ineffective bio box fails for a number of reasons with one of the most important being a failure to include a call to action. Most people need direction in their lives and the Internet is no exception. If you don’t tell your readers what to do next nine times out of ten they won’t do what you want them to do.
They have to be told to click on your website link to access the information they’re looking for and when they get there they should be persuaded to proceed further by a free offer or some other persuasive tactic to get them to subscribe to your email list or, better yet, buy your product.
An effective biography box is your stepping stone to increased traffic to your home business website and therefore should be constructed with this important factor uppermost in your mind. Therefore, a successful resource box should include, as we discussed earlier, an implicit call to action. It should tell your readers what to do and how to do it and should provide them a reward for their efforts.
This information resource should also include relevant links to your home page. Without these connections to your website all of your hard work will have been in vein because your readers will have no idea of how to find more information about your business and your merchandise. So it’s critical to check and recheck your links before submitting your articles to the various directories on the web to ensure they lead to your sales page.
Finally, you shouldn’t make your signature file or author bio too long winded and irrelevant to what you’re trying to accomplish. This paragraph should only contain information related to your ultimate goal, which is getting people to visit your website. Therefore, try to avoid unrelated links and information which may only confuse your readers and deter them from wanting to go any further. You should try to limit your resource box content to approximately 150 words.
Your resource box, your author biography box or your signature file, whatever you wish to call it, is crucial and may be the component which determines the ultimate success or failure of your article marketing effort for your home based business online.